Over 150 mining leases to lapse today

Miners say time left to get approvals and lease deeds not enough

The mining lease approvals of more than 150 major mineral deposits of iron ore, bauxite, manganese, lime stone and dolomite are set to lapse on Wednesday due to lack of forest and environment clearances, required for execution of a lease deed.

Following repeated appeals from the Federation of Indian Mineral Industries and the mines ministry, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) had on January 4, 2017, announced a notification waiving environment clearance for execution of a lease deed. The next day, it relaxed norms for forest clearance as well. However, there are only four official working days between the notifications and the January 11 deadline for the execution of the lease deeds. Miners have called these relaxations “too little, too late”. The miners are contemplating going to court for relief.

The amended MMDR Act, which stipulated that all mining licences for major minerals be granted through auctions, had a saving clause under Section 10A (2)(C), giving a reprieve to those mining lease (ML) applications approved by the Center or in favour of which the state governments concerned had issued letters of intent before the new Act.

The Act gave these ML applicants a deadline of January 11, 2017 (i.e. 2 years from the date of notification of an MMDR ordinance) for execution of the lease deeds with the respective state governments, after fulfilment of the conditions prescribed in the ML approval/letters of intent.

The most important condition for signing of a lease deed is obtaining environment clearance (EC) and forest clearance (FC).  But sources said more than 150 applications were pending for environment clearance (65 cases) and forest clearance (67 cases), restricting the miners from executing lease deeds.

EC and FC approvals can take six or seven years to come. “In this context, giving only two years in the Act for fulfilment of all conditions for signing a lease deed is unfair,” said a miner.

“Even if someone gets EC and FC approvals under the new norms, he has to approach the state government concerned for an order for mining lease execution, calculation and submission of stamp duty, etc, which at the fastest of pace would take at least four weeks,” said the miner.